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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25005796">Crosstalk.</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alcalexandria/pseuds/Alcalexandria'>Alcalexandria</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Dark Fate - Fandom, Terminator (Movies), Terminator - All Media Types, Terminator Dark Fate, Terminator: Dark Fate</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/F, Future War, Gossiping Soldiers, Resistance</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 05:00:52</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,612</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25005796</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alcalexandria/pseuds/Alcalexandria</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Oh, you know how soldiers always talk.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Grace Harper/Dani Ramos</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>85</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Crosstalk.</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Any feedback is really appreciated.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The Commander strode out of the hall past the breakfast line.</p><p>They watched closely.</p><p>Sure enough, just as she passed Grace - so slight they wouldn’t have seen it if they hadn’t been looking - a nod. Grace nodding back. And then – a flicker, just a <em>flicker</em> of a smirk before she looked away a second afterwards.</p><p>“No way.”</p><p>“Holy shit.”</p><p>“I am <em>telling</em> you,” said Hays, leaning back in triumph. “I will collect my winnings in full this evening, thank you and goodnight.”</p><p>“So just because they’re <em>nodding</em> in public means they’re…?”</p><p>- Franco elaborated with a hand gesture every bit as confused as it was obscene.</p><p>“Don’t be fucking disrespectful,” said Hays, slapping his shoulder. “Anyway, so what if they are?”</p><p>“Naw, it’s just… I don’t know, you never even see them talking.”</p><p>Burke scratched his beard.</p><p>“Kind of makes sense you wouldn’t any more though, if they’re trying to keep shit low profile?”</p><p>“Wait, so the fact they’re <em>not </em> interacting is proof they're fucking now?”</p><p>“I didn’t know the Commander was…?“ murmured Berg to himself.</p><p>“I can see it I think though? I think I just didn’t really think Harper was… anything”</p><p>“Christ’s sake Riggs, just because you struck out doesn’t mean-“</p><p>“Get fucked,” Riggs said, pouting, having hoped her various swings and misses with Harper were long forgotten.</p><p>“Who’s getting fucked?” said Willis, placing down his tray and climbing into the bench alongside them.</p><p>“Not us, that’s for sure,” said Blair. “Harper. Hays thinks the Commander has started treating herself to some of the Augments, and she might be right.”</p><p>“That’s not how I put it,” Hays grumbled.</p><p>“I’d heard she had some thing with that Air Force Cap-“</p><p>“Wasn’t it an Admiral-“</p><p>“Makes sense” said Willis, tearing into a lump of bread, and speaking past a mouthful of it, “- Harper and Ramos were tight way before Harper picked up her After Market parts though.”</p><p>“Oh yeah?”</p><p>“Yeah,” said Willis. “That’s how she got fucked up to start with, a bunch of Sevens dropped on them and Harper filled herself with airholes hauling Ramos into the South Gate. Wouldn’t pull back without her, had herself a whole Alamo alone.”</p><p>“A… what?”</p><p>“It’s a place in Texas.”</p><p>“- Shit, I didn’t know she was some -”</p><p>“What about Texas?”</p><p>“Were you there?”</p><p>“No. Friend of mine was a medic. Said Harper was spilled the fuck open, shoulda died. Maybe two or three years ago now? Wouldn't come out of the nowhere, all I'm saying. They’ve always been… I dunno, around each other.”</p><p>“Huh.”</p><p>“Damn.”</p><p>“So they’re a serious thing then, you’re saying.”</p><p>"We don't even know they're anything-"</p><p>“I guess,” Willis shrugged, and crumbs dropped out of his half grey beard. “If they're a thing. I dunno, I know Harper was one of the strays Ramos picked up herself, right at the beginning, so like I say, they go way back.”</p><p>“How come she’s still just a grunt then, if they go back that far?”</p><p>“ - You’d be pissing about special treatment if she was an officer -”</p><p>“Dunno,” said Willis, shrugging again. “Patrolled with her a few times before she Volunteered, I don’t think she’d have gone for the officer shit even then, you know what I mean? She’s the soldier type. Can handle herself real well but keeps to herself, I don’t see her sending people off to the front from a bunker. And thinking about it, I can remember her getting kind of worked up about it when somebody said some shit about Ramos a few times.”</p><p>“They’d be hot together,” said Riggs.</p><p>No one replied.</p><p>“- Oh, fuck you all, we’re all thinking it.”</p><p>“Kinda romantic,” said Hays, as if Riggs hadn’t spoken. “Supreme Commander and a lowly line grunt, sneaking around like one of those old stories.”</p><p>“They go right back?” said Burke.</p><p>“Yeah.”</p><p>“And she’s above and beyond for the Commander. And she can handle herself. And she got the surgery...?” Burke continued, leaving room for the others to catch up.</p><p>There was a collective little intake of breath.</p><p>“Wait-“</p><p>“No, no-“</p><p>“You're not-“</p><p>“Harper?!?!?!”</p><p>“Bullshit.”</p><p>Burke spread his hands with satisfaction.</p><p>“Why not? You said she nearly died at the South Gate, so we know she’s the self sacrificial type. She fits everything else.”</p><p>“But… <em>Harper?”</em></p><p>“Bullshit.”</p><p>“Come on.”</p><p>“Bullshit.”</p><p>“She’s so… quiet or something. I don’t know. She’s just not who I’d pictured.”</p><p>“Bullshit.”</p><p>“The way the Commander talks about The Soldier though…” said Hays to herself.</p><p>“Oh, oh I <em>get</em> it, “Soldier type”. Please man, you’re fucking with us.”</p><p>“I’ve worked with the Commander a few times”, said Berg, just quietly enough it didn’t sound like a boast, “I never heard her talk about Harper.”</p><p>“That doesn’t mean anything.”</p><p>“- What I mean is, maybe it would sound just the same. As when she talks about The Soldier. We all know the story, we've all heard her tell it. Wonder what she'd sound like talking about Harper.”</p><p>A thoughtful quiet descended on the whole table.</p><p>“Hypothetically, if it was her, would she know?”</p><p>“If they’re fu-“</p><p>“If they’re a couple, I’m pretty sure she’d have to. She must have figured it out by now right? Commander would have had to tell her sometime even, she'd have to, I mean we know how the story ends. Ended. The first time.”</p><p>Another quiet came, this one more sombre.</p><p>“Fuck, that’s heavy,” said Franco.</p><p>“Sex would be incredible though,” said Riggs. “All that melodrama?”</p><p>“Shut up Riggs,” said Willis brusquely, looking to Hays for reproach a second later. There was none.</p><p>He didn’t know the Commander, and had only patrolled a few times with Harper. Still. If any of this was on the money… it just didn’t sit right with him to talk like that. And even if it wasn't Harper, it wasn't right to talk about The Soldier like that.</p><p>Hays looked over to where Harper stood, still lined up.</p><p>Tall and at odds with the troops around her, but too reserved to stand out anyway. She didn’t talk to anyone in line and nobody talked to her, which she didn’t seem to mind at all. In fact, she seemed perfectly content, or at least Hays could imagine as much. It would be hard not to look at her a little differently from now on anyway, one way or the other, now she’d have this to wonder about.</p><p>Harper got her food served at last, and glanced around for a free seat. Several well blooded infantrymen at the table spooked like horses when she looked right at and past them.</p><p>Hays watched her walk up to, and by them - for a moment she was afraid Blair might bless himself - as they tried and failed to look casual. But it hardly mattered. As far as Hays could tell they didn’t exist to her regardless.</p><p>Harper found a seat and took it, unremarked upon by the raucous mechanics and burly artillery crews either side of her. Hays and Willis watched her, vaguely aware of the conversation around them as it moved on to something else.</p><p>Harper looked up at them both. And they both saw it – something neither could recall seeing in her before. Something human. Something unguarded that they couldn’t quite define, but might as well have been confirmation. Recognition.</p><p>Maybe she's heard them after all. Maybe Harper had just come to know the look of it alone, the awe or the pity in somebody’s eyes when they understood, when they realized who and what she really was. They surely weren’t the first – how many people were keeping this secret for her, they both wondered?</p><p>Hays felt herself wave vaguely with two fingers, baffled even as she did about where the impulse came from.</p><p>She was surprised even when Harper nodded back, discreetly enough for none of the crowd to notice, clear enough for neither Hays nor Willis to doubt it.</p><p>The three looked at each other across the hall for a long moment, settling into their quiet little covenant.</p><p>And then the greasemonkeys dropped something.</p><p>Peals of laughter and jeering. The uproar cleared, but by then the strange split second of understanding - or sympathy, or whatever it was - the three of them shared was gone.</p><p>Harper turned back to her food. Hays and Willis turned back to each other.</p><p><em>The others can gossip all they want</em>, they thought<em>. The others can wonder all they want. But we get to </em>know,<em> because we can keep the secret.</em></p><p>They’d had a glimpse of something bigger than either of them understood, or wanted to understand, and both knew it. All the times they’d all heard the story of The Commander, and the story of The Soldier, and somehow they’d never truly understood that real people lived in the heart of it all, in all that myth and tragedy. They had stumbled onto a vein here of something human and precious, and they both knew enough to sense they didn’t have a right to scratch it open.</p><p>Willis looked to his meal, and started shovelling it into his mouth. Hays followed suit.</p><p>The mechanics laughed, the artillery crews pissed and moaned, the line shuffled towards the counter endlessly, and Franco and Riggs started arguing about a boxing match neither had even been to. The conversation about Harper was already two topics ago, and by tomorrow it would be barely remembered by any of them; white noise in among all Riggs' bravado and twenty other types of Burke’s clever bullshitting. Hays and Willis hitched themselves back into whatever everyone else was talking about now, their diversion unnoticed.</p><p>Grace faded into the background of it all in peace. She had all she wanted, and it wasn’t here.</p>
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